All righty, I think I’ll pop in now and say hello:
When Patrick Nielsen Hayden told me about the wacky Tor.com thing they were thinking of doing, he also asked me if I would be interested in doing some blogging on the site. And I said to him, well, you know, I do have my own blog. And he said, yes, I’ve heard rumors of such a thing, but I’d be interested in you being Tor.com’s science blogger.
And I said, ooooooh, okay.
Because, as it happens, in addition to writing science fiction, I also write about science from time to time: I’m the author of The Rough Guide to the Universe, an astronomy book, and frequently contribute explanatory science articles to the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader series of books, most notably the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe book. Yes, yes, go ahead and chuckle at the idea of people learning science on the pot, but that book sold more than 100,000 copies, most of them not to your average science book reader. Now there’s a nice chunk of middle Americans who know a little bit more about science than they did before. I think that’s valuable, don’t you?
So when PNH said, hey, point out shiny science thingies on Tor.com, it was an offer that I couldn’t refuse. I love me the science, and I love pointing out shiny science thingies that I find online, on the blogs and in the magazines and other places online where people talk about science and topics related to science. And so here I am. It should be fun, because science is fun (well, except for the parts that are boring. But that’s what grad students are for. Whoo-hoo, academic slavery!). I plan on having fun, anyway. Hopefully you will too.
And there you have it: Hello, how you doing, let’s talk about science, shall we? Excellent.
